Parenting: "Try harder next time" is bad advice for kids too

Relevant: sarahconstantin [LW · GW]'s Errors, Bugs, and the End of Stupidity

A person taking a test or playing a piece of music is executing a program, a deterministic procedure.  If your program has a bug, then you'll get a whole class of problems wrong, consistently. [...] A kid who gets arithmetic questions wrong usually isn't getting them wrong at random; there's something missing in their understanding, like not getting the difference between multiplication and addition.  Working generically "harder" doesn't fix bugs (though fixing bugs does require work). 

Once you start to think of mistakes as deterministic rather than random, as caused by "bugs" (incorrect understanding or incorrect procedures) rather than random inaccuracy, a curious thing happens.

You stop thinking of people as "stupid."

Tags like "stupid," "bad at ____", "sloppy," and so on, are ways of saying "You're performing badly and I don't know why."  Once you move it to "you're performing badly because you have the wrong fingerings," or "you're performing badly because you don't understand what a limit is," it's no longer a vague personal failing but a causal necessity.  Anyone who never understood limits will flunk calculus.  It's not you, it's the bug.

This also applies to "lazy."  Lazy just means "you're not meeting your obligations and I don't know why."  If it turns out that you've been missing appointments because you don't keep a calendar, then you're not intrinsically "lazy," you were just executing the wrong procedure.  And suddenly you stop wanting to call the person "lazy" when it makes more sense to say they need organizational tools.

"Lazy" and "stupid" and "bad at ____" are terms about the map, not the territory.  Once you understand what causes mistakes, those terms are far less informative than actually describing what's happening. 

These days, learning disabilities are far more highly diagnosed than they used to be. And sometimes I hear the complaint about rich parents, "Suddenly if your kid's getting B's, you have to believe it's a learning disability.  Nobody can accept that their kid is just plain mediocre.  Are there no stupid people left?"  And maybe there's something to the notion that the kid who used to be just "stupid" or "not a great student" is now often labeled "learning disabled." But I want to complicate that a little bit.

Thing is, I've worked with learning disabled kids.  There were kids who had trouble reading, kids who had trouble with math, kids with poor fine motor skills, ADD and autistic kids, you name it.  And these were mostly pretty mild disabilities.  These were the kids who, in decades past, might just have been C students, but whose anxious modern-day parents were sending them to special programs for the learning disabled. 

But what we did with them was nothing especially mysterious or medical.  We just focused, carefully and non-judgmentally, on improving their areas of weakness.  The dyslexics got reading practice.  The math-disabled got worksheets and blocks to count.  Hyperactive kids were taught to ask themselves "How's my motor running today?" and be mindful of their own energy levels and behavior.  The only difference between us and a "regular" school is that when someone was struggling, we tried to figure out why she was struggling and fix the underlying problem, instead of slapping her a bad report card and leaving it at that.

And I have to wonder: is that "special education" or is it just education? [...]

As a matter of self-improvement, I think it can make sense not to think in terms of "getting better" ("better at piano", "better at math," "better at organizing my time").  How are you going to get better until you figure out what's wrong with what you're already doing?  It's really more an exploratory process -- where is the bug, and what can be done to dislodge it?  Dislodging bugs doesn't look like competition, and sometimes it doesn't even look like work.  Mr. Cohn was gentle and playful -- he wasn't trying to get me to "work harder," but to relax enough to change the mistaken patterns I'd drilled into myself. 

The problem with "try harder" is that it has an unstated implication that "try" is a well-defined action, and it's about "expend more energy", and that's just wrong.  All of the things you list (setting alarms, changing environments, using different tools) ARE ways to try harder. Or really, ways to actually try at all.  See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fhEPnveFhb9tmd7Pe/use-the-try-harder-luke [LW · GW]

Yoda at your kids (and yourself) a bit more.  At least for those things where the result matters.  For a WHOLE LOT of activities, especially for kids, the result is a small part of the value, and it's the habits, techniques, and activities that matter.  That's a whole different set of lessons, which "there is no try" won't help with.  The first time your kid outsources schoolwork to someone who's got a comparative advantage, you'll be both proud and horrified.

Really enjoyed this post. I have been talking about this sort of idea a great deal with my physio lately - people often put lots of unnecessary effort into actions that that they don't need because somehow they have a belief that 'effort is good'. He has had cases where he has e.g. shown more elderly patients easier ways to get up from a chair and they have refused because 'it is too easy'.  As children most of us were taught to put in 'effort' and 'try harder' whereas usually what you actually want is to find a better way of doing whatever you want to do, rather than to 'look as though as you are trying really hard'. 

I realised that I do find myself saying things to my children along the lines of 'I know you find your art lessons really hard, but as long as you are trying your best that is ok'. Their school reports include an effort grade for every subject and it's hard when I read their reports to them, not to say nice things about good grades for effort! 

I am trying to figure out how this reconciles with growth mindset vs fixed mindset ideas. I guess perseverance and effort are subtly different things, and that one can grow instead by considering different options and doing the type of brain-storming you are talking about. As a parent, I'm still trying to figure this all out. I guess the first step is just to be aware of when I am suggesting 'trying' and 'effort' - both to them and to myself! 

I'm not sure I agree.

Some class of errors/problems are due to taking the wrong approach. Trying harder here is indeed not effective and is bad advice.

Another class of errors are due to giving up too early, not putting in enough effort or not really caring about doing something well/properly. For this class of errors, "try harder" is legitimate feedback because the problem is indeed the amount of effort being put in.

An example from my time at secondary school. Some people would try to study but take the wrong approach and as a consequence not do that well. Telling them to study harder or longer would not have been good advice. Other people didn't really care, didn't study or pay attention in class and when they did it was only the bare minimum to avoid punishment. For the second group, telling them to try harder is good advice.

There's another question here over whether telling someone to try harder is often effective. The implicit assumption of the post is that no, its not. My experience in the real world is that in many situations you can motivate people to exert substantially more effort in an activity with "try harder" advice framed in the right way and with the right relationship with the person you're talking to.

Relevant old comment. [LW(p) · GW(p)]

Before responding with "try harder" try to observe and understand what they are doing. Brainstorming might even be too much. Deliberate Play [LW · GW] might be better.